Dada Masilo, a South African dancer and choreographer recognized for injecting African dance into daring, unconventional interpretations of classical ballets like “Swan Lake” and “Giselle,” died on Sunday in Johannesburg. She used to be 39.

A spokeswoman for her crowd, Bridget van Oerle, stated she died impulsively in a clinic nearest a short lived sickness.

Ms. Masilo constructed a name as a fearless choreographer who deconstructed ballet classics and fused them with African dance kinds. Her interpretations of works like “Romeo and Juliet,” “Carmen” and “Hamlet” intrigued critics and have been admired through audiences in South Africa and in another country.

“In the beginning, I battled just to make them speak to each other,” Ms. Masilo stated in a 2014 interview, relating to African dance and ballet. “I thought, OK, let me just try.”

Amongst her maximum lauded works used to be a homosexual spin at the Nineteenth-century ballet “Swan Lake,” wherein Odette, performed through Ms. Masilo, is married off to Prince Siegfried, who pines nearest a male Odile. Ms. Masilo stated she had sought after her “Swan Lake” to fracture gender stereotypes.

“I don’t just want to be a body in space,” she stated of her dancing and choreography in a 2016 interview with The Unutilized York Occasions, earlier than the manufacturing’s Unutilized York debut. “I want to open up conversations about issues like homophobia and domestic violence, because those are realities at home.”

Critics praised her powerfully muscular motion and her comic dealing with of Nineteenth-century ballets’ issues, by which she raised thorny problems involving race members of the family, feminist struggles and homophobia. She adopted “Swan Lake” in 2017 with “Giselle,” any other well-reviewed paintings that blended African dance with ballet and recent dance.

Dikeledi Masilo used to be born on Feb. 21, 1985, in Soweto, South Africa, and grew up as the rustic used to be transitioning from apartheid to a democratic govt. Her mom, Religion, a unmarried dad or mum, labored as a cashier, and Dada, as she used to be known as, used to be most commonly raised through her grandmother.

When she used to be 10 years impaired she started dancing with a local crew known as the Peacemakers, an initiative to reserve babies off the streets. She then studied on the Dance Manufacturing unit in Johannesburg, earlier than shifting directly to the Nationwide College of Arts, additionally in Johannesburg, the place she skilled in ballet and recent dance.

“I was bitten by the bug right away,” she informed The Occasions in 2016. “I fought very hard to be able to dance; my family did not like it one bit. They wanted me to be a lawyer or accountant, something stable.”

Nearest graduating from highschool in 2001, she moved to Cape The town to paintings with Alfred Hinkel’s Jazzart corporate, however she already knew that she sought after to journey in another country. “When I was 14, I saw a video of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Rosas company,” based totally in Brussels, she stated within the 2016 interview. “I wanted to dance like that.”

In 2004, she going to Brussels to audition for Ms. de Keersmacker’s P.A.R.T.S. college. “There were 250 people — I was terrified,” Ms. Masilo stated. However she used to be one in all 30 scholars decided on, and it used to be throughout her future at P.A.R.T.S. that she choreographed her first paintings, a solo about unhappiness impressed through Camille Saint-Saëns’s “The Dying Swan.” It used to be a tribute to an aunt who had died from headaches of AIDS.

The enjoy made her wish to discover choreography additional, she stated, partly as a result of she may just no longer in finding narrative works that she sought after to accomplish.

Nearest going back on South Africa in 2007, she danced in alternative community’s works and started to take on the classics: first “Romeo and Juliet “ (2008), then “Carmen” (2009) and “Swan Lake” (2010). She selected those works, she stated, for the reason that narratives “are so good, and the characters are so great.”

“I don’t feel that because I’m South African, these aren’t my stories to tell,” she added.

As Ms. Masilo’s recognition grew across the world, she additionally started to collaborate on tasks with the South African artist William Kentridge and with the South African choreographers PJ Sabbagha and Gregory Maqoma.

“To have someone who is engaged with the traditions, who is starting with the classics, but playing against expectations, who has the openness to allow all things to come into the dance — that’s a sensibility that feels close to me,” Mr. Kentridge stated in a 2016 interview.

Ms. Masilo is survived through her mom and her sister, Xoliswa.

Ms. Masilo’s contemporary works incorporated “The Sacrifice,” a reimagined model of Pina Bausch’s “The Rite of Spring.” Debuting in 2021 — and carried out extreme future on the Joyce Theater in Unutilized York — the piece explores the unedited ballet’s issues of formality and sacrifice through drawing on conventional Tswana dances.

At her dying Ms. Masilo were operating on an autobiographical solo piece in regards to the lack of family members, Ms. van Oerle stated.

In early December, she used to be known through the Town of Johannesburg with a celebrity embedded within the wall of the Soweto Theater. Accepting the award onstage along with her nieces, she stated she used to be pondering of her aunt. Writing on social media, she stated of the megastar, “It means so much coming from home.”